I had to deal with a bad case of freelanceritis last week.

I wound up going into the client on Thursday to do finishing touches on Fat Man before he shipped. Part of that entailed getting a couple of color decks printed out. Usually, when I’ve been going in, I’ve been using the nearby 8100 for prints (grayscale is fine for proofing). No problem the job runs through fast, without a problem.

A couple of weeks back when I was trying to get Little Boy out, I ran up against someone while I was trying to get color prints out. The person in question was printing somewhere between 8 and 11 color decks and loathe be the person trying to get their prints out as well. Anyway, I’m not interested in making waves so, I try to maintain as low a profile as I can when I’m at the clients (this is a good gig).

Forced into having to print color decks I was left no choice but to use the color printer (a fiery hooked up to a xerox color copier). Last time, I had printed the decks collated and was told I should send the job three times (allowing other jobs to spool, a reasonable request) so, this time I did just that.

My client contact came back and said, “it was taking an awfully long time for the job to print.” I usually send the job to the printer there and forget about it, their printer seems to be the nexus for a lot of people (including some who feel the need to see their emails in color). Consequently, you never know how many jobs are backed up in the spool and how big the files that are spooling are - since the copier is on the other side of the floor, I just figure I’ll walk over in an hour and the printouts should be there.

So, at the behest of my client, I walk over and there’s this gaggle of people surrounding the fiery. I’m sorry but, truth be told is was a bit of a hen party. I checked to the queue to see what was happening and the first printout was spooling (it was about a 19mb file not altogether large) but, since there is art on every page it takes a bit of time but, it was moving. I don’t know what had gone before it as I hadn’t been over there to see.

Anyway, again with the accusations. One person just postulated, “Oh! There must be a freelancer in today.” (yeah folks, these problems never happen to staff people. One of the joys of my life as a freelancer is taking the fall for some idiot staff person who doesn’t take the time out to check their page setup or driver before they hurriedly hit the print button).

So, I was looking over the queue, trying to see if the spool had gotten clogged with printed jobs (for some reason the setting on their fiery retains quite a few printed jobs although no one seems to realize they can just rerun a job from the queue), I was also trying to see what was going on with the queue for waiting jobs (there were quite a few which was one of the reasons for alarm) but again, wonder of wonders, most of them were someone’s emails.

Then one of the resident geniuses, found out I wasn’t the “tech guy” but a freelancer and said she didn’t think it was a good idea for a freelancer to be touching the precious fiery. Not a problem, I lifted my hands as if I’d been burned and got out of there fast.

When it was realized someone (a staff person in a rush) had printed out a job that called for a manual feed of paper (another thing which I was almost blamed for), there was some speculation about printing from my laptop causing the delay (of course when I printed out two decks later in the day after everyone had left and they shot right through that didn’t seem to be much of a problem at all).

After seeing the way some of the “staff” geniuses construct files it’s a wonder anything prints out at all. Believe me, seeing how someone puts together a file is akin to going through someone’s underwear draw - no secrets after that. You find out just how sloppy a person can be.